Sure, I know that installing Perl modules isn't that hard (once you've tracked down a make program for Windows - and once you've learned to avoid anything that needs a C compiler) but some people just don't want to know. All you have to do is accidentally say "non-standard" and a seemingly-sane business analyst starts to have nightmares about viruses or hackers. I have learned to avoid anything that doesn't come bundled with ActiveState Perl (and thank the g0ds, they've started including Term::ReadKey!!!)

Most people here are Unix hackers, believe me working with Windows - and habitual Windows users - is really, really frustrating.

And there are no newlines in the files - I know, it's our software that's creating them.

All well and fine. I have a situation again where ROOTman (as we will call him) does not like anyone adding Perl modules to the production server. Though he's a Perlist himself, requests for additional modules are rebuffed as he cannot risk this machine having a hiccup. We also may be tied to an older release for quite some time, until the new hardware arrives and then we get whatever Perl comes on the RH Enterprise install.

So, a hand-wired CSV solution is sought by those of us not in a position to "simply ppm or CPAN Text::CSV into place". Good material is sparse - even the CookBook example isn't all that great. I did track down a regex which I have needed to follow up with several checks and edits to patch things up...